Abstract
Contemporary conflict studies often cite actor “legitimacy” as a key mechanism linking rebel actors to a variety of outcomes, including civilian targeting, recruitment practices, and war termination. This article advances a conceptualization of legitimacy as a dynamic process of triangulation among rebels, their potential local constituents, and the international community. Rebels derive or lose legitimacy from the local population, but also from external audiences, which have played a central role in supporting peace processes in many conflicts. We explore conceptually a myriad of ways that rebels work to create and maintain legitimacy in the context of ongoing conflict, identifying the target audiences of these tactics. These are illustrated with an in-depth study of the Moro rebellion in the Philippines.
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Notes
See Rogowski (1974) on the influence of rational choice on political behavior.
These concepts are then linked to factors rationalists center on: the internal makeup of actors, the structure of payoffs, and the resources available to all actors. Rational constructivist approaches of legitimacy focus on how legitimate institutions in society (such as the United Nations (Hurd 2008)) affect these factors. Legitimacy from institutions can also be conferred through “favorable outcomes” or “procedural correctness,” combined with “good behavior,” i.e., conformity to global norms and standards (Jinks and Goodman 2003, 1758).
We acknowledge that rebels also employ violent methods to create and maintain legitimacy, such as terrorism. However, we focus this analysis on nonviolent strategies tied to legitimacy, finding their nonviolent rebel behaviors to be a phenomenon needing further inquiry and examination.
Interviews were conducted by Margaret McWeeney.
We specifically examine how some legitimacy-building tactics have been linked by scholars and practitioners to concessions for the Moro.
In addition, we worked with Muslim advocates at the Philippine Center for Islam at Democracy (PCID), Mindanao State University, and the US Embassy in a series of workshops on peace education. During these workshops, we met with current and former rebels and held a focus group of student advocates at the University of Philippines, Diliman who had been raised during the conflict. To get a diverse set of perspectives, we reached out to both male and female government officials as well as former rebels. We also studied public information on sites such as Facebook, which is hugely popular in the Philippines.
Despite the fact that MILF enjoyed better relations to the Ampatuan clan than the MNLF overall the relationship was not without tensions, as the Ampatuan patriarch Datu Andal had a well-publicized feud with a local MILF commander.
CVOs are local paramilitary/parapolice organizations that exist across the Philippines.
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McWeeney, M., Cunningham, K.G. & Bauer, L. Rebel actors and legitimacy building. Int Polit (2023). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41311-023-00493-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/s41311-023-00493-1